


To Return from Following You

by WildnessBecomesYou



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Crowley-centric (Good Omens), Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, M/M, and seduces hisself a lesbian, crowley runs away after the church bombing, in that ruth is a human and will die, you can thank bohemian rhapsody the movie for this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 06:25:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19987585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildnessBecomesYou/pseuds/WildnessBecomesYou
Summary: There’s one lifetime where Crowley shares a bed with someone who isn’t Aziraphale.(Inspired by the line "Your life is going to be very difficult" from the Bohemian Rhapsody movie and the woman's choir piece "Song of Ruth" by David Childs)





	To Return from Following You

**Author's Note:**

> Listen sometimes you've been up for 30+ hours and on planes for 18ish hours and you're watching Bohemian Rhapsody and Mary says "your life is going to be very difficult" and then leaves Freddie and ur brain goes "but what if that was Crowley"
> 
> and then u listen to choir music hoping to sleep and just end up going "oh _no_." 
> 
> have the results, hope u enjoy
> 
> (Yes, Crowley went femme for a hot minute and seduced himself a lesbian. explanations for flowers at the end) 
> 
> Important: Ruth contracts AIDS. Please proceed with caution.

There’s one lifetime where Crowley shares a bed with someone who isn’t Aziraphale. 

It begins in the 40’s, except for the fact that it doesn’t— she’s too young at the time, barely fourteen, and wrapped up in the drama of _boys_ and _what if I don’t like them_. Crowley frowns and replays the church bursting and burning around him and an angel. 

She looks like the angel, except that she doesn’t. 

She has round cheeks and a charmingly blushed nose, and freckles dotting her skin. Her eyes are hazel, almost golden, not blue-green. She has black hair that would be curly if she didn’t press it back to flat (Crowley will eventually convince her of this) and is already streaked with grey. She keeps her nails short and clean. She smiles at casual brushes of hands and always sits in the same booth of the local route 40 diner. 

In 1954, she is twenty-two, and she wears sunglasses with outrageous points that match the red of her ’52 Thunderbird convertible. She wears a scarf, too, cream to match the leather seats and dashboard. Her hand brushes against the waitress’s when she accepts a milkshake and she smiles. 

Crowley doesn’t know what comes over him. Maybe it’s the tilt of his body today; the slithering noise of tights against tights beneath a poofed out skirt, the scarf tight against his neck when he swallows, shucks off the _beautiful_ leather jacket. His hair remains domed into a perfect ponytail when he slides off the helmet, thanks to the obnoxious amount of hairspray he’d put to it. 

He doesn’t know what comes over him, but he slides into the booth opposite her, and she looks up in surprise and then delight. She sips from her milkshake as he orders his. He smiles back and blinks almost coquettishly. 

She doesn’t mention golden eyes with snake slits, though he’s nearly certain she can see them. Instead, she asks, “New in town?” 

He shrugs. “Driving through,” he answers, glancing at the motel across the parking lot from the diner, fixing a pointed second glance at his motorcycle with it’s tall, wide handlebars. “Lookin’ for a reason to stay.” 

She smiles and it _looks_ innocent. It’s not; Crowley has seen this look before, has left London to get away from it, can’t bear to see it in blue eyes.

Hazel will do. Blonde for black. 

“Ruth,” she says as she extends a hand. “Why don’t you stay a while?”

Crowley laughs. 

“You have _no_ clothes,” Ruth says in his motel room. “Are you on the run?” 

She has the audacity, naïveté, to look concerned for him. 

“In a way,” he says. She rubs at her lower back, eyes narrowing in concern. Then, all of a sudden, she shrugs. 

“Lay down,” she commands, but it’s gentle. He obeys. She turns him over and her hands go to his lower back, heels of palms grinding into his skin over his skirt, shirt, tights. He sighs. “Like that?” she asks, and if he didn’t hear the giggle he’d have thought it was all innocence. 

He huffs. But then he laughs, and she does too, and keeps massaging him over his clothes. Halfway up his neck, she begins to hum. 

_Just remember, darling, all the while: you belong to—_

“Don’t,” he whispers, and she freezes, lovely voice dying on the wind of him. 

“Sorry,” she murmurs, still not moving, confused. 

“Not that song,” he qualifies. “The massage is— I mean, your voice is lovely, I just—“ 

He wasn’t ready for that emotion to hit him. He wasn’t ready for the connotations in his brain. 

Her lips are by his ear in a breath, voice low, and he swallows. “We’re all running from something,” she says, and it’s warm. She sits back up and her fingers keep moving and her voice begins to hum an _Ave Maria_ he knows but can’t name. 

Angels are genderless. He makes the effort he knows will delight Ruth. She is diligent, detail-oriented, and damned good with her tongue. 

She is as loyal as her namesake, and when he gets too restless and the winter slows him down, she suggests they mount his Harley on the back of her Thunderbird and drive South. He asks what she’ll do when the winter is over. 

“Stay with you.” 

They leave for Miami in the morning, and she doesn’t ask questions about where he gets the money to pay for the motel and her first tank of gas. 

On Sundays, she goes to church. He does not. When she comes home, he asks why she attends. 

“God is…” her face screws up in the way Crowley knows means she’s thinking hard. “Unknowable.” Crowley shivers. “I like a good mystery.” 

Crowley does not love her, not in the way she wishes he would. He tries to explain it away— excuse it, “I’m not a good person” is met with “good or bad, it doesn’t matter,” “I’m not who I say,” is met with “I’ll love every you,” and “my heart belongs to someone else” is met with silence. 

It’s slow, and nonjudgemental, and Crowley aches in the silence. He hasn’t committed any miracles or deeds other than keeping them wealthy enough to afford this little apartment, and his fingers are twitching. She stills them. 

“That’s why you hate Patsy Cline,” she says after a long while. 

Crowley looks away. He swallows. She was supposed to make him forget. He’d chosen her for that, and now she’s gone and done the opposite, and given him what the angel never could. 

“Well, I’ll love you anyways,” she says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. She goes to their little entrance table and picks up her check, taps it against the door. “Come to dinner with me?” 

He does. 

In 1965, she is thirty-three, and Crowley makes an effort that surprises her. It delights her later, and she hardly mentions it when he doesn’t return it to the way it was in the 50’s. She even accepts him when he returns to trousers and suits, doesn’t leave his bed. She borrows his pants and blazers, sometimes, but she doesn’t leave. 

She stays, and he’s fond of her for it. He might love her a little, if demons were capable of love. 

In 1973, she is forty-one, and her hair has been blindingly white for two years. She receives a call one day that buckles her knees, leaves her wailing in a way that makes Crowley understand what _keening_ means. She doesn’t leave the living room that night, and Crowley holds her, and she doesn’t ask to go, but finds Crowley packing their clothes in the morning. 

“Your parents just died,” he says when she shoots him a confused whine. “Which of these do you want to wear for the wake?”

Crowley drives the Thunderbird. Ruth does not sing along to the radio. She cries, and she holds his hand, and once— just _once_ — she makes a joke about how relieved she is that Crowley is a man right now. 

In 1976, she is forty-four, and he makes a business trip. He returns with a tartan flask and makes the effort that delights Ruth, slims down his trousers and trades button downs for blouses. 

She makes the point, later, to remind him that all his efforts delight her. He blushes. 

In 1978, she is forty-eight, and comes home so pale it worries Crowley. He’s grown fond of her. He loves her, not in the way she wants, but he does. She announces that she is going to die, and that it is going to be horrible. 

She keens again, but it’s Crowley who’s knees buckle, and they share grief in the night and she refuses to let him touch her the way he wants to. 

He protests later that if they’re right, it’s already too late for him. When that doesn’t work, he reveals himself to her. 

Ruth does not run. It isn’t because she’s too tired to run, already spending more time in bed than out, but because she is Ruth. Instead, she smiles the same smile she shot him in 1954 in a diner around a milkshake straw. His heart breaks. “Well, Anthony,” she rasps, swallows around the water he offers her, “I was wondering what side you were on.” 

Demons are not supposed to love. They aren’t supposed to love angels, that is certain, and it brings him pain. It also brings him pain to love a human.

The thing about humans is that they die. The thing about demons is that they are made for pain. 

He reveals that pain to her, the same way he revealed himself, and she smiles, kisses his cheek and then collapses with the strain. “The two of you,” she rasps, and no water will soothe it, “are less angel and demon and more each other.” She does not explain herself, and Crowley lets her sleep. 

In 1979, the year barely new, crocuses pushing through the earth gently, Ruth is forty-nine. 

Ruth dies. 

Crowley had known the day was coming. He’d already arranged the funeral. He’d already taken her for a last drive on his Harley, in her Thunderbird. 

He held her hand as she passed. She’d brought her other hand to his cheek, rubbed the thumb along the apple of his cheek, and murmured, “Your life is going to be so difficult.” 

“Rest,” Crowley had pleaded with her, turning to kiss her palm. “Don’t worry about me, just— rest, Ruth, you’re home.” 

Her funeral is held in a church. Crowley had arranged for it. He stands in the very back of the holy space, wearing steel-soled dress shoes, his feet still burning. The pain is grounding; he was made for it. He loves her despite that he is not made for it. 

In 2019, Ruth has been dead for 40 years. She should have been eighty-nine; she is forever forty-nine. Her gravestone sits in her hometown, has a line of scripture— _“Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.”_

Crowley has not died; Aziraphale has not died. In darkness, they find each other, and begin a new life: _our_ side, and everything that implies, sweet and bitter all together. 

Aziraphale approaches Crowley, tiny bouquets of pear blossoms and heliotrope and marigold still clutched in his hands. He will not run out of them; the cemetery has many lonely gravestones, and Aziraphale will cover them all. 

“Ruth,” Aziraphale says appreciatively, tucking a hand in against Crowley’s right arm. Even through his gloves and Crowley’s coat, he can feel the heat of his angel. “What a lovely woman.”

“She was,” Crowley agrees, voice breaking. He looks up to the sky and readjusts his sunglasses. Aziraphale squeezes his arm gently. 

“I’m so very sorry,” Aziraphale murmurs, turns his head to press his lips to Crowley’s shoulder. Crowley turns his own head, rests his chin against the crown of the angel’s head. 

Eventually, Aziraphale lays one of his little bouquets on her grave. He kneels by it, tracing the curves of her name. Crowley waits a few moments before kneeling beside him, lays down a willow flower wrapped in spearmint leaves. 

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says, so softly that Crowley knows he isn’t meant to hear it, “for taking care of him when I could not.” His palm goes flat against the gravestone. 

It’s all warm for a moment. Crowley swears he can hear Ruth laughing. 

She’d been right. His life had been difficult. He had been scorned, and burned, and hurt. But he had already been those things when he came to her. He would experience it all again after she passed. 

But he had found love, and comfort, and acceptance, and Home, after it all. He had found many things in Aziraphale— many before Aziraphale found them himself. 

The angel and the demon return to their cottage in South Downs that night, and if anyone notices them suddenly appearing out of thin air, they’re smart enough to say nothing. 

Aziraphale turns on the record player, and it clicks into playing with no record in it. The voice of Patsy Cline emerges from the horn of it.

 _Just remember, darling, all the while: you belong to me,_ Aziraphale sings along. 

Crowley does not stop him. 

In 2019, an angel and a demon are well over six thousand years old. They dance in their sitting room, wrapped up in love and light and home. 

Ruth smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Aziraphale's bouquet:  
> Pear blossoms: affection and comfort  
> Heliotrope: devotion; I turn to you  
> Marigold: grief and pain 
> 
> Crowley’s bouquet:  
> Willow: melancholy/mourning  
> Spearmint: warmth of sentiment
> 
> Listen to Song of Ruth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO2HfK1DU0w 
> 
> Watch the scene that inspired this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGIkSNGA-FU


End file.
